Knowledge and Wisdom

Ah, Aristotle.

I really like this guy. Wanna know why? I think it's because every person that's ever irritated me could benefit from reading Aristotle. It sounds kind of mean, but I think Aristotle has those insights into everyday concepts that really clear up the whole picture, if you think about it.

For example, his take on wisdom. Aristotle mentions that there are different ways in which we characterize knowledge. His seems to be a distinction based on practicality and doing things with knowledge, and that is precisely what intrigues me.
As a philosophy major, I've found the single most asked question regarding my major to be:

"What are you going to do with that?"

Most of the time, they haven't even missed a beat before asking. They haven't stopped to consider what a philosophy degree is. They've heard the name, now they want to see it do something. When I try explaining what philosophy is and how it is enriching regardless of what nails it teaches me to hammer, I can see peoples' eyes glazing over and their foreheads reading: "UNEMPLOYED."

This has been the hardest thing for my parents as well, and it's been up to me to really explain what Aristotle does in this chapter. There is a difference between knowledge and wisdom, seeing as there is the kind of knowledge one gets from the lab and that can be applied to a study, and there is the knowledge that one keeps inside oneself.
That kind of knowledge is, I think, analogous to wine while the other is more like a cheap beer. Yeah, it does the trick when you need it, but knowledge that comes from philosophy only gets better the more you cultivate it. It can come in handy for mixed drinks or a dinner, it can be part of a collection. The beer goes stale once you've found a newer, better one.

The rambling is the result of a topic that kind of hits close to home, but I hope I've expressed it somewhat coherently.

The Virtues: Temperance

What I really like about Aristotle is that he seems to understand that the virtues are to be achieved by human beings, which means that he accounts for imperfection and a realistic process of working towards that virtue.
I particularly like his account of Temperance because I think it is what slips under the radar most often. Temperance is a discipline that regulates a person's craving for physical pleasure, and its extremes are licentiousness and insensibility. The former is a person who is completely obsessed with physical pleasure, to the point where being deprived of it causes the person pain. Insensibility is not all that common, but it could be a person who has become out of touch with their senses. Ideally, a person would feel appropriate amount of pleasure and direct it towards the correct things.

Some examples I could think of were:

Amber Sweets
Y'know, Paris Hilton from Repo: The Genetic Opera. She is completely obsessed with getting the physical high from zydrate, not to mention her only concern is what she looks like... Extreme #1? Check.

The second extreme was a bit harder to find... If anybody is familiar with the series Supernatural, you'll be familiar with this character. Castiel is an angel that is sent to guard the Winchesters. To do this, he must take on a human vessel. Because he is an angel, Castiel ends up forgetting about human needs and does not feed his vessel. This insensibility and disconnect with the body is evident in an episode where Famine (one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse) makes an appearance, and Castiel succumbs to the cravings in excess. This could've been avoided if he had been more in touch with the need to satisfy the body.

Nom nom, Cas.

Aristotle

To be honest, Aristotle is one of my favorite philosophers where virtue is concerned.

What I like most about his philosophy is the concept of habituation, that people become a certain way by means of practicing that action in the same way an athlete or a musician practices a certain activity. I think this is extremely accurate. When one does something that encourages a vice, it is very easy to maintain that habit and keep doing things like that.
However, the habit of doing virtuous things is much harder to start and maintain. This is why virtues are so highly valued in a person. If everyone could be virtuous, everyone would be. This habituation principle puts the responsibility where it should be: on the person. It is up to the person to begin doing virtuous things and to keep that habit over time.  

The Vice Grip of Philosophy

What really stood out about Alcibiades's speech, to me anyway, was that he described philosophy as a snake that bites your heart and you are infected with its venom.
This is a very different view from Nietzsche's, which compared philosophy to a foothold from which philosophers could skip on to the next step wearing leis and singing with woodland creatures.
However, I think this other description of philosophy is also very accurate. Philosophy isn't always rainbows and sunshine and wonder about the world. It is often despair and anxiety over the things that we can't explain.
The venom of philosophy isn't something we can easily get rid of, either. How do you train a mind not to wonder once it's learned how? Seeing all of the philosophical questions in the world is like noticing that your favorite shoes have a scratch on them. You don't know how it got there, but suddenly you can't unsee it. You wonder about what life would be like if you were just ignorant to the different issues that plague you, but there's no going back. In a sense, that is what is so beneficial about philosophy. It forces you to deal with things, rather than shove them under the rug like, "LOL, brb."

I guess it's more of a tough love on philosophy's part.

Diotima

Of all the speeches of Love, I think Diotima's is the most accurate.
While the others were overly hopeful or realistic, Diotima's really captured the transcendent nature of Love. Her description of Love as a spirit that is between mortal and god and acts as a messenger between the two is the perfect explanation for why we assign such grand characteristics to Love. We believe that Love can transcend lifetimes. We believe that Love persists in the afterlife. Whatever we believe about life itself, Love always makes an appearance; it seems to be able to adapt to any belief system and persist in a nearly intact form.
Diotima's spiritual explanation accounts for this adaptability of Love.

Another reason I really liked Diotima's speech is that is is even more realistic than the false hope of Phaedrus or the realistic view of Pausanias. She says that not only is Love not perfectly beautiful, it is also not perfectly ugly. She gives Love the same forgiveness she would a person, which is what makes Love so accessible. Just because Love isn't entirely good does not make it bad, otherwise we'd all be bad people.

Empedocles. The Party Pooper of all Party Poopers

This reading was especially hard for me to get through.

Why? I'm not exactly sure, actually. It wasn't a matter of density of the text, but rather the content itself. What I love about philosophy is that it expresses a deeper thought and wonder about the world than just everyday perception, and I'm used to seeing philosophy being used to think about dark and uncomfortable topics before.

This was different. I don't know why Empedocles struck such a sensitive nerve with me, but he did. The way he goes about thinking and the language he uses is just so utterly depressing that I had to take breaks reading him. I can see where he gets his ideas about the senses and human knowledge, but his language is vicious.

The way he talks about his own race as hopeless and miserable is very disturbing. He talks about human beings being born among moaning and misery, and it was kind of hard to see the bigger picture of his philosophy through this.

Empedocles. Dude. Lighten up.

Zeno

One thing that really caught my eye about Zeno was his concept of infinity and the argument about midpoints. Zeno argues that we never really experience any motion because we must first reach a midpoint in order to reach the end, but the distances we are trying to get through are infinite, and therefore it is impossible to reach a midpoint.
I feel like this is a very accurate representation of life in general. In a society like ours, where goals and a desirable life are determined by a majority vote rather than personal reflection, I often feel like I am getting nowhere. We can pursue academic goals, but these are infinite. There will always be something that we do not know, and we will surely die almost as ignorant as we were when we started, considering the vastness of the universe. Isn't philosophy a perfect example of this?

Thinkers have spent thousands of years reflecting upon the same dilemmas, and no one can walk away from the discipline saying (with confidence) that they have figured out everything there is to figure out about life and the role of a human being within that life.
In a way, this view is very depressing, because what is the point of trying to move if we will never reach the end? On the other hand, I think it is a great way to tell someone to just chill out for a second. There is no point in stressing out over getting to the finish line when the finish line is impossible to get to. Why not just take a leisurely stroll towards the finish line and appreciate the view instead?